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Come for the cats, be pleasantly surprised by something else

I have been asked by the house’s executives to get right to the important part of the day’s activity, which is, of course, the most popular feature on the site. So we will go directly to checking in on the kitties.

Phoebe is usually the driver of this, because she knows she is very photogenic. Just sitting on the landing of the stairs, look at those pretty eyes.

She does not want to share the mail, however. Sometimes she gets mail, but she’s convinced all of it is hers. She sits on it.

Oh, sure, she lets us have the bills, but she keeps the bulk mail, magazines and the like. She’s not supposed to be on the counter, but our cats are jailhouse lawyers, and they’ve figured out that if you’re sitting on a bank mailer, you’re not sitting on the countertop.

Poseidon is no better about countertops. And here he is, different day, same counter, sleeping on a box full of produce.

He’s waiting to see what’s inside. He loves trying to chew on some of our veggies. This summer he discovered corn stalks. Corn stalks are bad for cats, so we have to hide them. And we have to hide them when he’s not paying attention, because he remembers they’re in the fridge, or stored away here or there. He remembers long after they’re gone. He’s probably dreaming about corn there.

And when there is no corn, he might switch between pouting about it, and trying to charm you into getting some for him.

But we, of course, tell him no. He’s never one not to try, though. He’s a persistent little so and so.

The cats, you see, are doing well, and they thank you for your interest.

I had a nice cool swim this afternoon. It was a 1,720 yard swim. They’re getting a little faster of late, but there’s only so much improvement of which I am capable of. I know it, because I can still shave chunks of time off in pretty decent increments. Probably it’s the cooler water.

Also, I’m swimming enough to know when my arms will stop protesting and just do the work. And I’m close to knowing lap lengths just by feel.

But to demonstrate my ability: this is the summer where I’ve finally started to swim in a straight line.

More or less.

Let us return to the Re-Listening project. Here, I am listening to all of my old CDs in the car, and I’m playing them in the order of their acquisition. I’m also writing about them here, because we need the content. These aren’t reviews, because they’d be woefully out of date and I’m no critic. They are, however, sometimes full of memories, and a good excuse to post a few videos. These songs are from 2003, from an album I got in 2006 or so, of the overnight success, Howie Day, who was, in fact, a seven-year overnight success.

“Stop All the World Now” was the second album and, the major label debut, for Day. Critically, it got a lukewarm reception, but it went platinum in 18 or 19 months, and the third single, “Collide,” which you heard on the radio and in TV and movies a lot, was certified gold. And, two-plus decades later, it holds up as a pop-rock record.

And it’s full of hum-along songs, tunes you pick up quickly on the first or second listen and want to come back for a few more times. This is the fifth track on the album, and it fits that bill with an instrumentation that feels simultaneously earthly and ethereal, which seems a feat.

It is also of it’s time. But, there’s a small window on the musical calendar where rock was in an ebb and alt was disappearing and singer-song writers with some indie-pop sensibilities could fill some airspace and some evenings. I don’t really know what that means, except that I do, and it also sounds right.

This was the first single from that record, the first time a broader audience heard him. It was August 2003, and this sounds like that. I don’t remember the first time I heard that song, but I do remember the work I was doing late that summer.

I was doing interviews and producing a documentary on an upcoming tax referendum. (The tax went to a statewide special ballot vote that September, but this is Alabama and so it didn’t just fail, but failed spectacularly. The director of the state Board of Education was in tears on TV that night.) Also, at about that same time I was busy covering Roy Moore being removed from the bench as Alabama’s Supreme Court Chief Justice. Being Alabama, he got another shot at the bench, largely on the same religious rhetoric that got him kicked off the first time.

Probably I picked up on Howie Day a little bit after that. Sharp-eared listeners might have found him on the “I Am Sam” soundtrack, which we featured here a few weeks ago. He covered “Help!”

Day has had a handful of ugly legal trouble of the domestic and chemical varieties, but he’s still out there doing it. Day is touring on the 20th anniversary of this record right now.

Next time in the Re-Listening project, we’ll have a glance at a post-grunge album at it’s most polished and most posty.

Tomorrow, a meeting, and also a meeting!

cycling / memories / Monday / photo / swimming / video — Comments Off
16
Sep 24

Twenty years ago today, and this weekend, and today

Twenty years ago today Hurricane Ivan came ashore, straight up Mobile Bay. It came ashore as a Category 3 hurricane.

I woke up at that morning to go to work. My power was still on. The drive got treacherous pretty quickly. Visibility dipped. A 20-minute trip turned into almost a 40 minute drive, but the worst was yet to come for our area, which was a good 250 miles inland. That far away from the coast, hundreds of trees were down and power poles snapped. Miles and miles of power lines were on the ground before the worst had even arrived. Early on, the state broke its power outage record, with Alabama Power saying three-quarters of their customers were in the dark. We couldn’t communicate with people down on the coast.

Whole forests down there were snapped, shredded and felled by 100 mph winds down there. The eastern part of Mobile Bay took a wallop. In Gulf Shores, they had eight feet of water on the main drag. Everything almost a mile from the beach was underwater. A handful of people waited out the storm on the battleship, the USS Alabama which is a museum in it’s day job. One wind gauge on the ship broke after registering a gust of 105 mph, another recorded a 112-mph gust. “You could feel the whole superstructure of the ship move when a big gust would hit,” one of the men that worked there said. The USS Alabama weighs 85 million pounds, and she was shuddering.

Up in Birmingham, we reported the hell out of that hurricane. I was still relatively new in that newsroom — my last newsroom — and this was just the second big national story we’d had in my first few months there. So I was showing off a little, maybe. But it was important. Before the next day was out, the estimates were already rolling in that there was more than $10 billion dollars in damages and some places would be in standing water and without power for weeks. I think I worked about 15 hours that first day and something just short of that the next day. I was calling everyone I knew and reporting their experience online. Back then, I knew a lot of people all over the region. I was calling the parents of ex-girlfriends: Do you have power? What happened where you are?

Don’t know how you may be related to them in your day job (if not directly, certainly spiritually?) … but these guys are Pulitzer prizing their blog today. Especially great for those of us with ties to the area but who are not there.

Only al.com eligible for a Pulitzer. This was 2004 and it was all so very new. But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina went to New Orleans. Our colleagues at our sister company, The Times Picayune and nola.com won two Prizes, and they deserved them both and more.

We were writing a lot more than a blog. We were putting together multimedia stuff as it came in. We were running a weather central microsite complimenting the wire copy and the NWS content. We were moving fast and doing creative things and telling a statewide, regional story. We didn’t win a Pulitzer, but we were paving the way, 20 years ago today.

I had a 35-mile ride on Friday. Almost thwarted just six or so miles in. I bunny hopped a railroad track and caught the rear wheel on the far track and popped the tube, right after this lovely little spot.

So I stood in someone’s yard, taking the wheel off the frame and the tube out of the wheel. I fiddled with a new tube and finally got everything ready to pump it up. I carry a pocket-sized hand pump. All hand pumps have a limitation. They just won’t push enough air pressure to let you do much more than get safely home. And that’s when it works well. But my pump is 11 years old, it was probably cheap when I bought it, and they don’t even sell the thing anymore.

It works … some of the time. Earlier this summer, for example, it really didn’t. In that yard today, it didn’t. After I limped a bit farther down the road and stopped in a field to try again, my pump decided to get its act together. I had a good stiff tire and did the whole ride I’d planned out. Just a bit later than I’d expected. But the views were wonderful nonetheless.

I did the last few miles in the extended neighborhood. Enjoying this view on a perfectly quiet road, soaking this in. This is why I enjoy riding in the evenings.

(If that’s not the nighttime video, just refresh the page and scroll back to it. There’s an autoplay function here I can’t turn off right now.)

I had a nice and easy 20-mile ride today. Easy, and somehow I found myself sprinting along a road at 36 mph, which is about where I max out these days. I’m not even sure why I did that, and I felt it for a good long while thereafter.

But before that, corn stalks!

It’s a nice time to be outside, so I’m spending a lot of time outside.

I also had a swim on Saturday. The pool was chilly, but that makes you go faster, they say. I think if there’s anything to that it’s just because you’re trying to get out of the water. But there was a comfortable 1,720 yard workout. That’s a mile, which sounds like a lot, but it isn’t, not really.

Today, I had another mile swim, and it was a bit faster, but still slow. But fast for me, because i was trying to get my laps in before the chill set in. The thermometer said it was 76 degrees.

And so I begin to wonder, what is my tolerance? And how many more outdoor swims can I have before we find out?

Quite a few, I’m hoping.

journalism / music / photo / Re-Listening / swimming / Thursday / video — Comments Off
12
Sep 24

The press section put me over the top

This will be quick, because I am behind. (Watch this now become a 3,000 word, two-hour post.) It was a lovely day, foggy this morning, but then the low clouds turned into mist and it all rolled out just before noon. The mercury got to 81, found that this was an appropriate effort for mid-September, and stared there. It was all delightful.

Two news items piqued my interest today. If you get two a day, you’re probably working too hard at it. If you get more than two a day, you’re probably living in a decade-long election cycle and you should put down the phone, close the computer, and walk away. So I stopped at two.

This first one, simply because I came up with a slogan that should appeal to two opposed elements of modern society, Republicans who think their pets are at risk from their neighbors, and anyone else that would like to not catch an illness from a sick neighbor in denial.

NJ Republican governor candidate introduces bill to outlaw wearing masks in public

A Republican candidate for New Jersey governor introduced new legislation Thursday that would prohibit people from wearing masks in public, just weeks after a similar bill was passed in Nassau County on Long Island.

The bill would prohibit masks in certain circumstances, but even its sponsor, Sen. Jon Bramnick, acknowledged that it is a long way from passing.

[…]

According to Bramnick, there are people using masks to disguise themselves and commit crimes, and that’s who he wants this bill to target.

He believes that ultimately it would be an additional charge when a crime is being committed and that “legitimate mask wearers have nothing to fear.”

The bill would make it a petty disorderly persons offense for people to congregate in public while wearing masks or obscuring their faces in some way to conceal their identity.

Legitimate mask wearers. Police will know the difference.

Look, politicians who need to demonstrate their tough-on-crime bona fides push these sort of proposals, without a single care about putting high risk and immunocompromised people in greater danger, all in the hope of squashing protests and heightening surveillance. That’s all we’re talking about here.

But here’s my idea. And it works as a slogan or bumper sticker.

You can’t eat the dogs or eat the cats if you are wearing a mask.

The newsroom’s editorial board calls this what it is.

Start with this basic question: What if a troublemaker simply decides to disguise his face with large sunglasses and a hat, instead? Are we going to criminalize sunglasses and hats, too? Where will it end?

Not to mention all the enforcement and constitutional problems that this bill presents. Even with an exception for people who wear masks for medical reasons, it’s a threat to personal freedoms, because it leaves it up to the cops to decide whether someone has a legitimate medical reason for wearing a mask at a public gathering.

How will they know that? It’s subjective. And based on past experience, we know what that means: Police will disproportionately stop and question Black and brown people, who have also been the most likely to continue wearing masks to protect against COVID-19.

And, as Jim Sullivan of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey adds, this “overbroad and vague” bill “also gives law enforcement the ability to target people based on their political beliefs.”

This think piece … from Dan Froomkin, curiously enough, is just about the most frustrating thing you’ll find today.

Trump’s mental capacity is now topic one

The Donald Trump who melted down on the debate stage Tuesday night is not a well man.

He sounded like a lunatic. He expressed his belief in things that simply aren’t true. (Think: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”) He was easily distracted. He repeated himself. He lied egregiously.

Is he competent to be president?

That’s a question journalists should be asking, prominently and relentlessly, until Election Day.

[…]

Concerns about Trump’s mental state are hardly new. They’ve been raised for years on social media, in opinion columns, and on cable TV. But they’ve generally been avoided by traditional news reporters.

The good news is that this is officially no longer a story that’s too hot for reporters to touch. A permission structure has been established — by the New York Times’s star political reporter Peter Baker no less.

PERMISSION?!? I yelled to no one at all. PERMISSION? NOW YOU HAVE PERMISSION?!?

I said Froomkin, curiously enough, because he started Press Watch for a particular reason.

Press Watch is an independent non-profit organization devoted to encouraging political journalists to fulfill their essential mission of creating an informed electorate and holding the powerful accountable. It is funded by donations from readers and the philanthropic community.

The Trump era, like never before, has exposed the weakness of the elite media’s refusal to be seen as “taking sides” in matters of public interest — even when it comes to verification of facts and democracy. As a result, corporate political journalism ends up spreading lies instead of shouting the truth. It engages in false equivalence that normalizes outrageous political extremism.

[…]

This website is intended to agitate for change. It encourages reporters to fight disinformation more enthusiastically and effectively, especially when our democracy and people’s lives are at stake. It identifies best practices that others can emulate. It urges the reality-based parts of the industry to explicitly condemn Fox News and other far-right propaganda outlets as disinformation operations.

People who love journalism are deeply troubled by the media’s loss of credibility with the public. Press Watch’s view is that we lose credibility by not fighting more assertively for the truth.

Permission. You don’t need permission. Or political cover. You need the support of your publisher and to inform your audience. A person, any person, running for high office is always under the microscope. Or should be. I can’t image how the news business has lost it’s credibility.

Permission.

It was a lovely afternoon for a swim, so I swam. My arms and feet took me one mile, but I ended up at the same place I started from. And that’s laps, to me. I say my feet, but it was mostly my arms. I am not a good swim kicker.

I keep forgetting to kick. Then I remember, and I kick. For about 15 yards, maybe less, and then I stop again. And a lap or so later I’ll remember, Kick! And so I kick. Maybe 10-15 years, and then I forget again. And I did this today for 1,720 yards. It was nice.

Back outside for the nightly chores, the view above was peaceful.

You can hear kids playing, and a few adults chatting up the street. It’s a perfect, mild THursday, and why wouldn’t they be outside doing those things until deep into the evening?

Let’s dip our toes back into the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. So, I figured, why not write about them here, too? Pad the site! Content is king! And there’s nothing better than 20-year-old content!

Or so I told myself before I sat down to write about 2003’s “Long Time Coming,” Johnny Lang’s fourth studio album. I picked this up in 2006 or so. And, for me, it’s a record I’d listen to once in a long while. It doesn’t find a lot of extended play or repeats. Lang was a gifted performer — sadly, he’s had some health issues that took him away from music — and it’s important to remember here that he was 22(!!!) when he released his fourth album. But, with the exception of a few moments this one doesn’t really stand out as his earlier efforts did. It made it to #17 on the Billboard 200, which was his best placement yet, and great for mere mortals. His live record at the Ryman, in 2009, would climb to the second spot on the blues charts. And that makes sense, the guy was a seriously talented live perform.

This record, though, it wasn’t highly received, and while it hasn’t aged poorly, it isn’t a fine wine. And the Re-Listening project isn’t meant to be a review. I’m just posting music and occasionally trying to summon up a memory to go with a song. But I don’t have any here, because it just didn’t get that many spins. Right from the first track, you can feel the genre fusion beginning. There’s a bit of a lot of things on this album, and maybe that’s part of the issue. And, again, the guy’s 22 years old.

I’ve always thought this song should be on infinite rotation in produce sections across this great land of ours.

Tell me that you wouldn’t happily puzzle over the ripeness of that pineapple during that chorus.

If blue-eyed soul and blues had an exemplar … well, there are many … this would be one, too.

And that’s sort of the difficulty here. Lang had been blowing away critics and fans since he was 15 or so. Here, it just felt a little workmanlike.

As we realize, over and over, music is a strange business.

And there we go. Fifteen-hundred plus words. As I said, I’m behind.

music / photo / Re-Listening / Thursday / video — Comments Off
5
Sep 24

‘Forever’s not so long, stop moping’

I was chatting with a friend who got a new phone. He’s rightly impressed by the quality of the images it takes at night. And they have greatly improved, haven’t they? If we can solve the digital zoom problems, and let people take high quality photos of the moon, that super computer in your pocket will really be something.

Even money on which impossible thing phone designers can solve first. Thing is, they do so many other things pretty well, or excellently, those are the next big things they can brag about in ads. Generative AI ain’t it, designers.

Anyway, I stepped outside to take a photo for comparative purposes. It’s been a pleasant discovery of late to learn that my phone, a bit older now, still takes interesting photos of the night sky. I went out to demonstrate this, because why not? But it was one of those nights common to the season. A bit overcast. Still, a few stars amidst a pixelated background.

When I came back inside and looked at the photo again I was impressed. The camera caught light reflecting off the maple leaves. The light is coming from a small handful of solar powered yard lights, mounted 80 feet away.

How much harder can it be to let me take archival quality moon photos from the small rectangle that also plays music, games and shows me maps?

It’s time for another installment of the Re-Listening project. This, as you might recall, is where I am listening to all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a fun bit of nostalgia and good music and I’m writing about it here, for days like this, so I can pad out the site. This isn’t for review — because who cares? — but it is an excuse to put some good music here, and sometimes they come with memories.

Today the memories go back to 2005-2006 or so. It’s another used purchase, a Barenaked Ladies record, their sixth record, 2003’s “Everything to Everyone.” This was a year before Steven Page started wondering about his future in the band, six years before he left. And 15 years before they were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. They released three versions of this record. One was a standard 14-track effort. The limited edition features three bonus tracks from some improvised acoustic sessions. A special edition included a DVD. I got the one with the extra tracks.

And here’s the thing, despite my love of the band, I am not a big fan of this record. Some of the songs, if anything, are too catchy.

Consider this earworm.

That was the last single off the record, and it was released only in Canada. The first single is another song that’s too sticky, even if the video is appropriately ridiculous. The theme is too, I suppose, but it will be in your heads for hours if you listen to it more than once.

Most of my recollection of this record is hearing those two songs too often, and at times it seems like that’s all that’s on here, but there are some great understated efforts on this project. Ed Robertson is always good for one of these.

I’m in the group of people that wishes Page and the rest of the guys could put it together again. BNL works well as a foursome, but Page’s voice and stylings make the band truly great.

Mixed in here are a lot of songs that were more political than their previous efforts, but also a lot of sounds and themes that felt like the same old band, familiar as the old flannel you were wearing when you discovered them. (Though I was probably wearing a henley.)

Come on, this was released in 2003, but that absolutely feels like a henley … if a song can feel … like a shirt.

This one’s just nice. That’s all, that’s it. It’s just nice.

But here’s the problem. I said I had the limited edition with the extra tracks. Here they all are. This is an acoustic version of a song I shared a moment ago.

The acoustic songs have improvised percussion, which makes me want a concept album of their catalog with entirely improvised instruments. (They’re so talented some of those songs would come off better than their originals, I’m sure of it.) And here’s an acoustic version of “Maybe Katie.”

Seriously, there’s a part of my mind or my memory or both that thinks this is an entire record of just those two songs. I wish I could recall the circumstance behind that impression. It must have been a hard drive to somewhere.

This is the last extra song, and I have no recollection of this one whatsoever, because see above.

The next time we return to the Re-Listening project, we’ll check out a soundtrack from a 2002 motion picture. And, it’s a soundtrack of cover songs. You probably know every one of them. If you’re familiar with early 21st century films this should click into place for you without any more hints. You’ll hear some of them, probably, next week.

But, first, come back here tomorrow, too. Because we’ll have something fun to help us mark time until the weekend.

cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
2
Sep 24

Happy Labor Day

Happy September, happy Labor Day, happy Monday. There’s a lot going on, clearly. And so this will be brief. And though brief it be, it has all of the important things. Including the site’s most important weekly feature, our check in with the kitties.

Phoebe continues to enjoy spending sunny summer afternoons in this window. She can keep an eye on the comings and goings of the neighborhood and enjoy the warmest part of the sun.

A little kid lives across the street and plays in the yard quite a bit. I wonder if Phoebe sneaks a few peaks in between naps.

I mean, if you had to be a cat, this is the way to do it, right?

Poseidon, as I write this, is complaining that I’m not holding him. It’s one of his three speeds. So you’ll have to give me a few minutes to placate him.

So the cats are doing just fine.

The site’s least important monthly feature is checking in on my cycling progress. The mileage took a dip in August, as you can see from the flat bits on the right side of the blue line. I’m still well ahead of last year’s pace, when you compare the blue line to the red line. I’ll get my real mileage over the green projection line here again soon.

So it continues to be a good year, a personal best year. September should become a new personal best compared to all the other Septembers. I’m predicting a good autumn, in terms of bike rides and the miles I can keep adding to the spreadsheet.

And, this weekend, we had an 30-mile ride. Except it wasn’t really easy, because I had to keep up with my lovely bride, who is fast.

Today a member of the family is stopping by to visit. Tomorrow, the fall semester begins. So I’m going to go get some work done.